Rule Forty Two: The Self-Aggrandizing Website of Gavin Edwards

Last year, while sorting through some mildewed videotapes in my garage, I discovered three VHS tapes that contained the complete year-end countdown of MTV’s top 100 videos of 1988, unwatched by me since they were broadcast over the last ten hours of that year. Since then, I’ve been working my way through the tapes, and analyzing the videos in more detail than would seem reasonable to anybody–including the artists starring in those videos and myself.

It took me fully seven months to plow through the ten videos and four commercial breaks in the countdown’s third hour. Wow. That’s pathetic. I’ll try to pick up the pace a bit.

Maybe, but I’ll take the other side of the Bobby Brown bet: By this point (last day of ’88), “My Prerogative” was still rising — it hit No. 1 in January ’89 — and so MTV might have held it for the ’89 countdown. And the first single from Don’t Be Cruel, the title track, was more a radio hit than a video hit; I don’t think MTV played the clip all that much. In general, the Cruel album’s success was a bit of a left-field phenomenon that no one (except maybe MCA’s promotions dept.) saw coming. Brown’s first solo joint was a flop except at R&B radio, and I don’t think anyone would have bet his sophomore album would be the late-breaking multiplatinum smash it became (Billboard‘s No. 1 album of 1989).

As for Bon Jovi, they’ll probably chart high here with “Bad Medicine” but that’s it. At this point I believe “Born to Be My Baby” was still rising.